This came from a guy named Maxwell Sackheim who was the fellow who invented the Book of the Month Club. You'll see a couple of his ads later. This guy was in direct marketing for 75 years. He passed away in the ‘80's. But he was in direct marketing for 75 years and he invented a lot of things that we all take as standard back before any of us were around. These are the questions that he always asked and I suggest that you take these four questions and put them up right in front of your desk or computer.
Question #1
Why Should Your Target Prospects Read or Listen to You?
Can you answer that question? Why should your targeted prospects read or listen to you? That's a good question, because you think you have something that is of interest to them? I don't think so. Think about this very carefully.
Question #2
Why should your target prospects believe what you have to say?
Now these days, and remember, he wrote these four rules back 50 years ago, can you think of a more skeptical society, there's no way that it can be more skeptical.
This isn't just for the United States, it's the same in Australia. The guy in England I'm talking to says it's just as bad there. Everywhere, everybody is skeptical of everything, with good reason, because just
about everything we've been taught is wrong, and everything we believed in has been proven to be untrustworthy and so forth. Why should anybody believe anything you have to say?
Question #3
Why should your target or prospects do anything about what you are offering?
Because you need the money? That's not usually a good reason.
In financial businesses, people will make financial transactions because they have to make a car payment, but they have people's money they can move around. You guys don't have that luxury. If you want to get something, you should think why should they do anything about it.
Question #4
Last, but not least... Why should they act now?
One of the things about direct response is we set it up so have to respond and the sooner the better. We're still getting responses a year after people ask for information, that's fine, but if we had to wait a year for all the responses, we wouldn't be doing too good.
So, what's going to get them off their butts?
Ask yourself these questions. If you can't answer these questions, then the piece isn't ready to go yet.
We often get the question "I put in an expiration date and as people are starting to recognize that the expiration date doesn't really mean a whole lot because you're going to send me another piece of mail later anyway or if I come back to your site, there'll be a new expiration date. Do you see the trend that we are losing that urgency to buy based on the expiration date?"
All I can tell you is we've been doing it for years and since we started using the expiration dates the results have picked up.
When we do subsequent contacts via email or regular mail we don't refer to the expiration date once it's passed, but in general we get a lot of people that call up and say "Today's October 6th and my deadline is today, I want to get this going because I don't want to miss out on the free gifts."
You'd be amazed at how it pushes people up and it's giving them a reason to act.
You can test your expiration dates, you can test it without the expiration dates and see what happens. Our tests without expiration dates don't work as good as the ones with expiration dates. So that's all I can tell you.
Here's A Great Example of a Site That Answers All The 4 Questions
(connect to the Internet and click here to see the example)
This excellent piece by a real pro Corey Rudl, uses one of the oldest, and most trusty techniques there is in writing killer copy, especially if your product or pitch relates to making money.
Do you know what he's done? OK, I'll tell you. First of all, he's using the "discounted dollars" approach right off the bat in his headline. He makes a powerful, hard to ignore announcement.
He tells you that you can make over $10 for every dollar you spend, which is a strong proposition, and by itself will get lots of prospects to stop and pay attention, which is the only point of a headline, right?
But notice what else he does. He doesn't make the BIG mistake most amateurs would make. He doesn't assume you know that a 10 to 1 return is high or even good. No, Corey knows that you can never assume your prospect "gets" anything, or assume they understand what something means! See, Corey, very wisely, goes on to tell you that this 10 to 1 deal is the highest return on your marketing dollar.
But Corey doesn't stop there. Nope. He still needs to make you even more interested and curious now that you know you can make a 10 to 1 return, and that it's a high margin. He now tells you that this amazing result has been made possible by the fall of the idiot dot.com companies that went bust.
Why does Corey do this? Why add this fact to his headline? Well, it's very simple. His prospect knows that the dot.com morons went belly up, but what he knows the prospects don't likely know is just how, or why, this seemingly unrelated piece of news allows the results he's touting to become possible.
Let me ask you. Do you know why the fall of the dot.com mental midgets allows YOU to make an obscenely high profit margin on your own marketing dollars? If you don't know why, which is highly probable, you'll want to know, won't you? And if you get "hooked" by the headline, and if you do only ONE thing after that..Corey's done the hardest job there is in marketing.getting someone to STOP DEAD and keep reading!
The job is to get them to STOP whatever they were doing, and read the next sentence! That's it. All that headline is being asked to do is get you to STOP and read the very next sentence!
And if you look at his next sentence, you'll see that it's another killer headline! Corey's not satisfied with just one killer headline! He wants you to get sucked in even more! Now he teases you with the possibility of a one man outfit doing over 5 million drachmas a year! If you got "hooked" by the first headline, and you read this next one, you should be properly "hooked" and will do the only job this second headline was trying to do.to get you to read his first sentence of his copy! And once you do that..if he can write any kind of decent copy, you're well on your way to taking money out of your pocket and making it Corey's money!
Another key thing Corey does on this piece is PROVE that what he's saying, which is almost too good to be true sounding, by SHOWING you his checks and pictures of him being interviewed by Maury Povich and so on. Corey's very quickly dispelling your natural skepticism about how a "kid" like him can make so much dough with a one man operation.
See, Corey knows you don't believe shit, especially about him making all this money. Since he knows you don't believe shit, he pre-empts your bullshit detector by immediately proving he's not lying, and proving it in an overwhelmingly convincing way! He SHOWS you the proof, because seeing is believing, right?
What he's doing is handling the hidden objection you have in your brain, BEFORE you stop reading because of it. He's not making the amateur's mistake of NOT bringing up objections immediately, because of being afraid to point out a potential flaw. Amateurs wrongly assume if they don't point out problems with your message or product, that the prospect won't think of it him or herself. This is as naïve as the government assuming if they don't teach kids sex education, they won't think of sex themselves. (Hence, we have the HIGHEST teenage pregnancy rate in the free world, but that's another story for another time.)
See, in a live sales presentation, you might hear the prospect voice the objection and be able to handle it. But since this isn't a live sales presentation, Corey's wisely brought it (the skepticism) right out in the open and annihilated it efficiently. (The only thing he might have done that could have made this a little stronger is to have said something like, "I know you don't believe anything I'm saying and think I'm full of shit. Well, let me tell you why...")
Now let's step back in time...